


Cathedrals

by greenpen



Series: Cathedrals [1]
Category: Homeland
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:14:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25717114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenpen/pseuds/greenpen
Summary: She stops. She looks up.He put you back together again as someone else.She doubles over.No one is coming to save her.
Relationships: Carrie Mathison/Yevgeny Gromov
Series: Cathedrals [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951657
Comments: 39
Kudos: 77





	1. Monk's Dream (minus twenty-five days)

She doesn’t know how far she’s run. 

It hurts. But if she stops she knows it will hurt more. So she keeps running. The pain doesn’t go away. She just acclimates to it. It starts out bearable, and for a few minutes she thinks she’s overcome it, maybe her body has moved beyond pain, ascended to a plane of existence where pain doesn’t exist. Then she feels it. The tightness in the back of her leg. A cramp in her side. A blister on her sole. A piercing pain along her shin. She keeps going in spite of it, one foot in front of the other, smooth rhythm. She bears it and so by definition it is bearable. 

Her physician says she’s just overworking herself. She needs to slowly ramp up, a gradual escalation. These are words that are not in her vocabulary. So she lies and says the pain is a two when it’s actually more like a six. Then they let her run. 

_It hurts._

_I don’t give a shit, do it._

She doesn’t know how far she’s run. 

If she were more diligent about counting she could approximate. She guesses fifty meters from one end to the other, so each lap is a hundred, so if she does that a hundred times it will be somewhere around six miles, which is the goalpost by which she’s measuring this very specific outcome. She loses count somewhere around lap seven. 

“Running clears my head,” she tells Doug. Which is true, it does. It clears her head of the work and dregs up a jumble of disparate thoughts, a patchwork quilt of memories, daydreams, observations, repetitions. She tells Doug that running will allow her to access the time she’s lost. Which is a lie. It doesn’t. It won’t. 

She hears her breathing, steady in, and out, back in again. Eventually it fades and she no longer hears that either. 

They keep her at Landstuhl. She doesn’t believe in divine intervention or punishment anymore, but she traces her life back to the moment when she woke him, and she believes there is a straight line from there to here. 

_Is there no line, is there no fucking line?_

_You shouldn’t have left me in there._

_It’s almost over._

_No, it’s too hard I can’t keep going._

_Yes you can. Yes you can._

_See you on the other side._

_See you at Ramstein._

They never did make it to Ramstein. 

It starts to drizzle. The drops on her skin feel like tiny needles, and she sees the rain come down like pins from the sky. She can’t decide if she likes that feeling but it stops before she makes up her mind. 

Each lap she bangs her hand on the chain link fence— _a sliver of green_ —and it vibrates and rattles and that becomes the musical accompaniment she lacks. She imagines the sharpness of a trumpet, a wailing bass, and this, her contribution, a clashing cymbal. She hears the dead static of a needle spinning on an LP. 

_Monk’s Dream, signed by Thelonious himself._

She invents the music in her head and then she actually begins to hear it. Her breathing is the metronome, the steady beat. Every fifty seconds: _crash!_ She taps her fingers together. She can hear it, she can. 

_He’s making contact._

She inhales more slowly, then out, that feels good, that’s a release. 

_Don’t stop, don’t stop. Harder, harder._

In. Out. 

_He offered me comfort. And I took it._

In. Out. 

_And I loved him._

In. Out. 

_Go to hell._

_I believe that’s where you are going._

She stops. She looks up.

_He put you back together again as someone else._

She doubles over.

No one is coming to save her.


	2. The Last American in Moscow (eight days)

He left her in Ramallah eight days ago, with clear instructions and a promise to meet her in Moscow soon. She nodded distractedly and said quietly, “Okay,” and in response he placed his hand on her shoulder, his own wordless way of saying, yes, it _would_ be okay, he would make it so. 

He finally sees her again at Ramenskoye Airfield. She turns the corner and there she is, like no time has passed but on her face: years. Her clothes are the same, only wrinkled. The lines extend to her face, and her eyes are red around the edges, sunken and opaque.

He opens the door to a large SUV and she climbs in, no greeting, no acknowledgement even of his presence. He gets in after her, and the two other agents Mirov sent get in the front seat. 

They ride quietly back into the city while she stares blankly ahead, at nothing in particular. Outside, the trees have no leaves and the sky is white and empty.

He wants to ask her how the journey was, is she hurt or tired or hungry. Stupid things. He notices one of the agents, Ketsov, glance back at them every few minutes and he wants to punch him. He notices her shiver out of the corner of his eye and he wants to remove his jacket and drape it over her, but he doesn’t because he knows they’re watching. There are so many things he wants to do but instead he just sits there, noticing, hands on his knees.

He doesn’t know how to act around her. It’s over now. She’s here. He won. He said he didn’t, he said it wasn’t a game, but it was and he won. He circled her like a snake slowly squeezing the life from its prey and when she finally gave way he let go and saw all the places she was broken. 

He wonders if she knows that he is watching her. Her future is in his hands now; they both know that. He doesn’t want the control but he knows he’d go crazy without it. Does she hate him? Did she ever? He knows these are silly things to think about, but it’s over now. They could… _she_ could. 

Instead of a GRU safe house, he’s arranged for her to stay at a hotel. The thought of her sleeping in some decayed cell block turns his stomach, and he figures it is the least he could do, though he knows she wouldn’t care either way. 

He’d argued with Mirov to make it happen, telling him that if they wanted her to be of value they needed to treat her like something valuable. Mirov had just huffed, sitting behind his large mahogany desk, king among kings, disinterested and obstinate at the same time. “Fine,” he’d finally said. “But she’s your girl. It’ll be your head.” 

Maybe this was all penance. For the past few weeks he’d told himself that because she had seemed to move past it, because she could stand to be in the same room as him, to speak to him, to touch him, to kiss him even, that what he did was at least forgivable, if not okay. And maybe she had actually forgiven him, or at least begun to start. Maybe this was all still that, his own wordless apologies for taking something from her that he would never be able to give back. 

The car rolls to a stop and he looks over at her but she remains perfectly still, staring out the front window. He gets out and walks to the other side, where Ketsov has opened the door. 

“Carrie?” 

She turns to the other seat, where he was, but he’s gone. 

“Carrie?” he says again, and she turns the other direction, where he is now. He reaches across her lap and grabs her bag. 

“Come on.” 

She follows him into the building, which she realizes is a hotel, trailed by two other men. She turns to look at them for the first time. They are tall and broad-shouldered, dressed as civilians. One has a beard, the other’s clean shaven. 

_I don’t know these men, they’re making me nervous._

She follows him into an elevator and the men squeeze in beside her. Yevgeny presses a button for the twelfth floor. The elevator's walls are all mirrors and she looks straight ahead, at his reflection, and notices a small nick on his face, just below his left temple. A cut maybe, from shaving. He still has stubble. The skin has patched over there, a small red dot where the blood has dried. 

He leads her down the end of a hallway, removes a card from his front pocket, and opens the door. She stands still at the threshold as he walks in. The other two men are still standing a few paces behind, hands clasped neatly behind their backs.

He drops her bag on the bed on the way to the window, where he parts the curtains just enough for a column of light to flood in. Then he circles the room, twisting his arm under lamps as he turns all the lights on. 

He looks back at her. “You’ll stay here,” he starts, and her brain must interpret that as an invitation to enter because she finally does. 

“I don’t know for how long. A few weeks, maybe. While we get everything in order for your residency.”

“My—” she says. Her voice is scratchy. She realizes she hasn’t said anything in hours, maybe longer. She swallows and tries again: “My residency?”

“I could only get your asylum granted for sixty days. Short term.”

She nods but doesn’t actually understand what he’s saying. Sixty days feels like an eternity to her now. Sixty days ago she was still in Germany. Sixty days ago she still had a family, a country. Sixty days ago she still hated him. 

He keeps talking. She turns her head and the two men are still hovering just outside. 

“Carrie?”

She turns. 

“Room key.” He holds up a small plastic card, a different color than the one he’d used before. “Cell phone.” A black flip phone. “My number’s in there already.” He places them both on the nightstand. 

“I will send a car to pick you up the day after tomorrow. They just have some questions they want to ask you. It’s all a part of the process.” 

He is being so vague and normal like she’s just arrived here for a business trip and she thinks darkly, _maybe you have_ , and she’s really not sure who _they_ are or what _process_ he’s talking about, but she feels both too foolish and too tired to press him. 

He must sense her confusion because he raises his eyebrows and stoops his head a fraction. 

“Okay?”

“Okay.” 

“If you need anything, just call me.” 

She swallows and nods her head as he walks past her. 

“Yevgeny?”

He turns. 

“What day is it?”

He squints his eyes and tilts his head, like she’s an equation he just can’t figure out. It’s small, but she knows. She knows that look and she hates that look: pity mixed with relief. The look of a sane person standing in front of a crazy person thinking, _at least it’s not me_. 

“Wednesday,” he finally says before shutting the door behind him. 

She stands now, alone, in the cavernous room. It occurs to her then that it’s actually a pretty nice room. Not extravagant, but certainly more accommodating than the motels she’d boarded her assets up in. She is that now: an asset, _his_. 

She walks over to the door and peers out the peephole into the empty hallway. In another time, another life perhaps, she’d be sweeping the room for bugs now, tracing her fingers under desks, removing generic artwork from the walls, taking the batteries out from television remote controls. The thought occurs to her like a quaint childhood memory she’d forgotten about until just now. 

She doesn’t bother. For the first time in her life she has nothing to hide and nothing to give. She feels utterly depleted. She recalls old movies where women would drag clothing across ridged metal washboards, scraping and twisting, forcing the dirt out. 

As it is, she hasn’t bathed in six days, and she feels a sudden surge of embarrassment at how she must have smelled to him and his cohorts, and that makes her feel even dirtier. 

She walks into the bathroom and examines herself in the mirror. Her reflection seems blurred, smudged somehow. She runs her middle finger under her eyes and feels the smooth, bluish skin there. She examines the pad of her finger, shiny with oil. Then she strips and steps into the shower. The water is hot, scalding even. She braces both hands against the wall and lets the water envelop her, etch its heat into her skin like a brand. 

_Fucking peace._

She stands there for a long time, very still, letting the steam fill her lungs until she feels close to drowning, until she thinks she might suffocate. Then she steps back. 

She throws her head back and inhales until she feels something sharp in her chin, at her throat. Cold air. She does it again. 

She shuts the water off, still heaving, gasping for breath. She sits on the edge of the tub. She thinks she might be having a panic attack. She retches, but nothing comes up, _because there’s nothing here thereneverwas_. 

She staggers out of the bathroom, dripping wet, and finds her bag and the pills inside, which rattle a familiar, even song. An Ambien tumbles out. She wavers a moment and then bites off half of another and winces at the bitter, chalky taste. She puts on fresh clothes, combs her hair, scrubs her face. 

She approaches the window and looks out onto the street below, quiet and mostly empty. She has no idea where he’s taken her, but she guesses it’s far outside the city center. Maybe he’s worried she’ll be spotted. Then she remembers there is no one left now, only her. Will the last American in Moscow please turn out the lights? 

She draws the curtains closed. The phone he left her reads 14:19 but the room is dark now, time inverted. 

She loses her breath again and inhales sharply. There is still not enough air. 

She peels back the duvet on the bed and smoothes her hand over the sheets. She hears his voice and the _rip_ , as sharp and clear as a bell. She feels his body wrapped around hers, as real as her own body, as her heart beating in her chest, as real as if he was standing right there. She wants to shut her brain off but it does the opposite. 

If that’s not real, then maybe this isn’t either. Maybe this is a dream, or nightmare rather. Maybe none of this happened. Maybe she will wake up twenty years ago and think, _what a funny dream I just had_. No terror, no war, no soldier, no traitor, no cell, no hole, no mother. No death, no noose, no padded walls, no birch forest, no mother, no him, not him, nothing. 

She turns onto her side and spots it then—as real as the faded drop of blood on his cheek. A tiny red dot, glowing in the distance. If she’s quiet enough, she can hear him watching.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "He took something from her he can never give back" (which appears in this chapter, in a slightly modified form) was one of the first sentences I ever wrote in this story, before I knew what it would become. This line really informed how I've thought about their relationship and how I wanted to represent it. You could call it a thesis statement of sorts. 
> 
> Thank you all for reading and for the kind comments on the first chapter!


	3. Half-dream (four weeks)

“If I ask you a question, will you give me an honest answer?” 

“Depends what you ask.”

They are in a small bar about twenty blocks from her hotel, a place that doesn’t strike her as his typical scene. To her American eyes it seems somewhat blue-collar, a little dingy. A place for locals but not locals like him. She thinks maybe he’s taken her here to avoid being seen with her. Which gives her a nascent thrill, if she’s being honest. She likes the thought of making him uncomfortable. She likes the idea of being an inconvenience.

They are alone together for the first time in forty days. 

He’s taken her here under the pretense—her word, not his—of celebrating the approval of her long-stay residency. Now she can move into an apartment and out of the hotel room he’s kept her in. Now she has general freedom of movement anywhere in the country. Not that she has anywhere to go.

He twists the cap off his German beer and slurps up the foam and she has a flash of a memory to Brody, in a bar not unlike this one, half a lifetime ago. 

_ I like it when life is like that.  _

_ Don’t leave me like this.  _

She looks away, at some other patrons seated just out of earshot, then back at him. 

“Last year,” she starts. “Did you always intend to use me to get to Saul’s asset?” 

He narrows his eyes at her, but his mouth is a straight line. 

He inhales slowly. “Yes,” he says, with a slight tilt of his head, almost like it’s the most ordinary thing he could have done. 

She shifts in her seat, brushes the hair from her face. There is validation and relief in this, she thinks. In the truth. Laid bare before them. She looks away again. Suddenly she can’t stand to look at him. She’s not disgusted with him, far from it. She knows she’d have done the same. Jesus, she  _ has _ done the same. 

But she can’t understand the part of herself that’s sitting here with him, willingly, bordering on content. It feels like another yarn of betrayal. She keeps pulling and pulling, no end in sight. 

“ _ But— _ ” he continues, long and slow. She turns back to him. 

“But what?” 

“But I… I did not expect that we would…. I did not think you would end up going through with it. Or that you would come to Moscow.” 

“Why not?” 

He shrugs his shoulders, all nonchalance. 

“Can I ask another question?”

“If you like.” 

He takes a sip of beer, and she stirs the lime wedge round and round in her glass of club soda. 

“What you said happened at the asylum—”

“What  _ happened _ at the asylum,” he interrupts. 

She pauses and considers him. 

“I think you remember more than you say,” he says. 

“What do you mean?” 

“Just that.” 

Maybe he’s right. But even now, looking at him, being in the place where it all supposedly happened, his stories don’t feel real. She tries to hold them in her mind again, let this all fall away until she’s back there with him. She wants to hear the sharpness and clarity of his voice but she can’t. It’s like the middle of a dream, where she can remember the images but none of what was said. She places them in the forest, walking side by side, but it’s all completely silent, wordless. 

Her  _ not knowing _ feels like a black hole inside of her, a canyon of nothing. Any detail he’d provide or memory she produced on her own would get sucked in and dissipate, and then cease to exist. 

“I don’t,” she says simply. 

“I’m sorry,” he says then, and she wishes he hadn’t. 

The air has shifted between them now, volatile and unpredictable, and she wonders if he planned it like this. She wonders if she will ever stop feeling like a toy he likes to play with. She’s unsure what he might say or do next and while in the field the uncertainty was intoxicating, here, in his home, in this public place, it feels dangerous. 

“Do you want another drink?” he asks. She looks down at her glass, still nearly full. 

“I should get back. I have a busy few days coming up.” She gives him a half smile and he returns it, nods, then rises. 

“I will walk you back to your hotel. I don’t think you know the way.”

She doesn’t say thank you but just follows him out into the night. It’s chilly but the wind feels sweet and welcoming on her face. They walk the fifteen minutes back to her hotel in silence. She’s not sure why but he escorts her all the way to her room. 

She opens the door and takes a step inside before turning back to him. 

“Yevgeny?” 

He raises his eyebrows. 

“I… thanks for walking me back.” 

His lips twitch up as he looks down at her, eyes wide. She realizes that she’s suddenly nervous. She remembers Kohat.

She scans him, hands stuffed into his pockets, towering over her, staring back at her as she stutters out the words she can’t bring herself to say.

_ Come here.  _

_ C’mere.  _

_ Cummeerr. _

She doesn’t know if she wants to push him away or pull him closer to her, and she reaches her hand out and places it flat on his chest and lets him decide. She observes her outstretched arm and for a moment that seems to extend before her like an unspooled thread she wonders if this has actually happened, if it’s just another half-dream. Again she can’t hear anything. Though perhaps they’re both quiet. And she watches as he circles his hand around her wrist, pulls her to him and brushes his lips over hers. Her arm folds into his body and she sighs into his mouth, a small sound. She feels one of his hands at the back of her head, tangled in her hair, while the other holds tight to her wrist, holds her greedily to his body.

She pulls away from him briefly to ask if he wants to come in and he nods.

The room is bare and plain and exactly as it was when he was last here. There are no signs of her in it. 

She excuses herself to the bathroom, which happens to be where all signs of life are. Two bottles of pills, deodorant, her toothbrush propped upright in a water glass, a tube of toothpaste with the cap half-shut. She clicks the door closed and stands against it, hand still on the knob, for what feels like a very long time. 

She listens carefully, trying to hear what he’s doing. Is this a test? For her or for him? Would she find him sifting through her things if she opened the door right now? There would be nothing to find, she knows this, but she still doesn’t trust him, even though she doesn’t think he’s lying to her. He drips with apology, it coats his tongue, drapes over his eyes. He is tender with her, borderline loving, it could be that too.

_ I lost my place in the world, I lost everything.  _

_ I’m sorry I hurt you.  _

She doesn’t want that, not from him. 

_ I won’t allow it.  _

When she comes back out again he’s sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, hands on knees.

She approaches him slowly and he follows her with his eyes across the room until she’s standing right before him, between his legs. 

“Look, Carrie, we don’t—”

“Shh,” she says, and places her thumb on his lips. He inhales and then swallows. “I want this.” 

She kisses him, tentatively. It has none of the frantic, desperate energy of two months ago in Pakistan. It is slow and careful. She knows no one is coming, she knows they are finally alone. 

She tugs at the hem of his shirt, scrunching it in her hands, lifting it slowly before he removes it in one swift motion. 

He places a delicate hand on her waist and she thinks he will begin to undress her but his fingers just linger. It’s like he’s never touched her before. So she undresses herself and he follows. 

She suddenly realizes she’s not been naked in front of another person in over a year. She feels exposed in a way that frightens her. She is hardly prudish but her overt vulnerability in the moment—he could do anything he wanted to her, though he shows no indication—briefly takes her breath away. 

He guides one hand along her body, from the back of her knee, higher, to her hip, her waist. She catches it along her ribcage and pulls it to her breast. She can feel his erection against her thigh. 

When he finally enters her she sighs, half out of relief, half out of something else she can’t place or identify. With few exceptions, throughout her life sex has been a means to some end. Not devoid of pleasure, but rarely devoid of purpose. Here, now, she senses the absence of that, of feeling him inside her and not wondering what happens  _ next _ .

She doesn’t need anything from him because there is nothing left to get. There is the emptiness of her future, and the immediacy of their bodies, and nothing else. 

_ Islamabad first.  _

She thought there would be something second, something after, but now she knows there isn’t.

In a way, it’s liberating, purifying. She doesn’t consider whether this might be a mistake because there are no consequences anymore.

Her orgasm is slow and it radiates out from the center of her. She holds the back of his head and makes a sound in his ear and he comes too. They stay like that, almost perfectly still, as she catches her breath and regains awareness of their nakedness, and his hand on her back, and the faint whir of cars on the street below them. 

She combs her fingers through his hair and smells the faintest linger of cigarette smoke waft into the air, like dew leaping from grass when you brush your foot across. 

She has a flash of his cheeks sucked in, his lips wrapped around the filter of a cigarette. And he drops the cigarette and stamps it out with his foot and she looks down and it’s dirt. And she looks up and it’s bare branches and grey sky. And she looks at him and his lips are moving and forming words she still can’t understand. 

“You want a cigarette?” he says, and she is back, and they are still naked. 

“No.” 

He shifts and puts his briefs back on, then digs in his jacket for a cigarette and lighter. He opens the door to the balcony and walks out. From a distance she can see an orange glow in his eye as he cups a flame to his face. 

It’s chillier now with the door open and she puts her shirt and panties back on and climbs into the bed. She is beginning to understand the phrase _ bone-tired _ . She feels an insatiable exhaustion all over, in her jaw, her eyes, things she didn’t know could feel. 

He comes back inside a few minutes later, carrying the stale but comforting smell of tobacco. She hears a rustle and the unmistakable clang of a metal belt buckle. She knows all too well the sound of a man attempting to quietly put his clothes back on. She lifts her head and turns to him. 

“You don’t have to leave. You can stay… if you want.” 

He is tying the laces on his boots. 

“I can’t, I’m sorry.” 

She wants to ask why but she just drops her head back to the pillow. He walks over to her and bends down so he can look at her properly. 

“Sleep now. I’ll talk to you in a few days.” 

She attempts a smile, but it comes out all wrong: embarrassed and unsure. 

“Okay,” she says. 

He brushes her hair out of her face and kisses her softly on the lips. She tastes the nicotine in his breath. It is close to intoxicating. 

He says goodnight in Russian and then leaves, shutting the lights off behind him. 

In the darkness, alone, her feeling of purity begins to fade. She did want something from him: to feel whole again, to let him join the two selves of her that only he remembered. But he wouldn’t abide. Maybe he knew. Maybe this was his way of maintaining the upper hand. Maybe she had completely misread him. She doesn’t know when but eventually the pitch black bleeds into sleep, and when she wakes the next morning she can still smell smoke in the room. 


	4. Small Apologies (nine months)

Whatever is between them, it doesn’t happen abruptly, but gradually, slowly, little by little. He can sense it happening while it’s happening and feels powerless to stop it. He doesn’t want to stop it, he doesn’t think she does either, but he’s aware of it all the same, like wind brushing up against his back, carrying him ahead. 

For instance, they don’t decide to move in together. But slowly, over time, enough of her belongings—a toothbrush, panties, an extra bottle of pills, her running shoes—accumulate at his apartment and before he knows it, they’re living together, like some unspoken arrangement. She still has her apartment in a not-so-great neighborhood but she hardly spends any time there. He has only been there a few times himself but the place was so depressing, so blank and small, he began inventing reasons to avoid it. She spends every night at his place, writing until the early hours before climbing into his bed and placing his arm around her until they both fall asleep like that. 

He shows her the listing for the penthouse one winter evening. He had been meeting with a real estate agent in secret, taking occasional long lunches to visit properties during the day, staying later at night because he knew that’s when she was most productive and she wouldn’t mind anyway. Tonight, he is home early, and he finds her sitting at the counter in the kitchen of his big-enough apartment, her fingers on the computer keys offering an irregular, familiar melody. 

He digs into his bag and pulls out the collection of papers he’d printed at work. He arranges them out before her like evidence: the massive chef’s kitchen, the oversized living room with floor-to-ceiling windows, the giant tub overlooking the patio and incredible views of the city and river, the large bedroom with an adjacent and similarly large walk-in closet. Everything big, large, massive, king-sized. 

She glances away from her computer for a few seconds. “Wow” is all she can muster.

“What do you think?” 

“It’s nice.” 

It is like pulling teeth with her sometimes. 

“You don’t have any more thoughts?” 

“It’s very…” He grabs a wine glass from the cabinet and pours from a bottle of Grenache. She gives him a look in return. “...Large.” 

He laughs and she returns to her computer. 

“I bought it,” he says, as casually as if he’d just shared that he’d bought a new pair of pants. 

He takes a sip of wine as he eases up behind her. 

Her fingers freeze and she lifts her head to look at him.

“What?” 

He plays with her hair, gathering it behind her neck, a new habit he’s formed. 

“I bought it,” he repeats. 

“Can you afford that?” she says, which makes him laugh. She begins sliding her thumb up and down her middle finger, her own nervous habit, and he clutches her hand to quiet her. 

“Yes, I can afford it.” 

Wealth and power don’t turn her on like other women he’s known. She enjoys nice things, but she’d be just as happy in a one-bedroom fifth-floor walkup as a six-million-dollar penthouse. So he tells himself that he didn’t buy it for her so much as himself, because wealth and power  _ do _ turn him on. 

“Well… ok, then.” She slides her hand out from his grip and he fights the urge not to feel too hurt. He has learned to be patient with her. To not ask too many questions. To know when to let her steer. To let her think that his ideas are actually hers. Plant the seed, then let it grow. 

He trails his fingers through her hair again and kisses her on the neck. He snakes an arm around her chest, slipping his fingers beneath her shirt. She shivers and he exhales into her skin. 

“Yevgeny…” she says, her voice breaking on the last syllable. 

“What?” 

“I’m…” she swallows. 

He shuts her computer and turns the chair around so she’s facing him. 

“I bought it for us, Carrie.” He says it tentatively, like someone trying out the answer to a question they’re not sure is correct. 

She swallows again. 

“I bought it for us,” he says again, this time more assured. 

“We—” 

“Do you like it?” 

He leans forward to kiss her before she can answer. 

In his mind, she smiled fully and spoke in Russian:  _ but what does this mean? _ Even though they both knew what it meant. And he told her that they could have everything they wanted, she would never want for anything. 

He plants a million small apologies in the only way he knows how. He feels so foolish sometimes. He remembers her bloody smile, the hair that wasn’t hers, the way her flesh gave way to his fist, hard and soft at the same time. He’d never hit a woman before. What they share now is a secret, finger to lips, quiet sounds in the middle of the night.  _ But what if we were loud, what if we threw parties?  _

“Did you really pay six million?” she asks breathlessly. She tugs at his shirttails, fiddling with the buttons. 

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe this does turn her on. 

“A little over,” he says. 


	5. Matryoshka (one year, three months)

The sun rises early here, before five, and he gets up with it like clockwork, every day. He keeps the shutters closed but sunlight pours into the bedroom through slats. 

Spring came late (“seems to me it skipped over us entirely,” she’d said) but summer is here now, and she sleeps in a small nightgown and nothing else.

He pulls his clothes and shoes on quietly, careful not to wake her, and runs his fingers through his bed hair. 

He does his usual route out onto the winding roads, through fields of wheat and flowers that are probably weeds, into the village. 

He’d bought the dacha years before, once he’d finally had the money to make good on his boyhood promise to himself, and he’s come to know the townspeople now. In recent years he hasn’t spent as much time here as he wanted, but whenever he returns, he is always comforted to find that the merchants and bakers and grocers remember him—if not by name directly, then at least as the man who owns the large estate just outside town. They aren't overly friendly, the village isn’t like that, but they give him a sense of belonging, a calming security. 

He had been waiting to take Carrie here for months, sensing her mixed feelings not only about the extravagance of it but the history too. How he had taken Simone here, how Carrie had sent in a team of trained killers to capture her, how all the while he’d been sitting across from her, hating her, and being hated in return. How only a day later she’d orchestrated what has remained his biggest professional embarrassment, and he’d put her in a cell with a book and left. 

They don’t talk about that now. 

Nevertheless, she’d agreed to a month-long sojourn here, at a time when Moscow typically emptied out anyway. Some of his colleagues went to their homes in the Baltic, others to Greece or the Amalfi Coast. He’d only wanted to come here. He’d sold it as a writing retreat for her: get out of the city, change of scenery. She was knee-deep in the book now, but it didn’t seem to be getting any easier. She’d agreed late one night in June and two days later they were here. He’d felt guilty at first, like he might have tricked her, but he was surprised at how well she acclimated to the complete change in routine. 

He picks up a pastry and coffee on his morning walk and strolls through the open-air market as merchants start to set up their booths for the day’s first shoppers. Occasionally he makes idle chatter with one, picks up knick-knacks and cradles them in his hand before setting them back down. Today he spots a table with a variety of intricately carved wooden figurines. There is a beautiful cherry abacus and a latticework cutting board and knife with a polished oak handle. He eyes a Russian nesting doll at the back of the display, painted bright shades of red, green, and yellow. He picks it up and opens the first shell and smiles at the familiar gift inside. 

Every day when he returns she asks, still sleepy, lazing in bed, “so what did you bring me?” And every day he comes to sit down next to her and opens the lid of the white cardboard box to show her that day’s bakery special: kolaches, pain au chocolat, chouquette. 

He feels suddenly overcome with the desire to buy this for her instead, to open the white cardboard box and reveal this tiny treasure. 

He pays the man and sticks the wrapped doll into the box carefully. He walks the mile back, beads of sweat on the back of his neck. 

He climbs the stairs quietly again and she turns when he opens the bedroom door. He opens the shutters and lets the sunlight stream in. 

“What did you bring me?” she asks, right on cue. 

“Espresso,” he starts, and sets the paper cup on the nightstand beside her. 

“My hero,” she says. She pulls herself up and takes a sip, making a face. 

He opens the white box. “Kouign-amann,” he says. “I’ve never heard of it before today but the woman at the bakery said they are very trendy.” 

“It’s butter and sugar, how bad could it be?” 

She takes a bite, one hand cupped under her mouth to catch the crumbs. She smiles instinctively and he kisses the corner of her mouth where errant grains of sandy sugar have stuck.

She sticks the pastry back in the box. She only ever takes one bite, leaving the rest to him. 

“Ay, you missed one,” he says. He unwraps the doll from the tissue and places it in her hands. She is silent for a moment, eyeing it. 

“Matryoshka,” he says finally. “I saw it and thought of you.” 

“I remind you of a Russian doll?”

“No,” he says quickly. He shakes his head. “No. Just… you, and all the lives you’ve lived.” He opens the first doll to better make his point. “ _ Inside _ .” 

It’s only half the truth. He thinks of her, a person inside a person inside a person, the way he uncovers one only to find another, and another. She is more forthcoming about her past than he imagined, the men she’s loved that are not him. Sometimes she tells him stories he already knows, stories she told him years ago. He nods and listens as if it were all brand new. 

What he’s said now he’s unsure if it came out right or if he’s offended her. How can he explain the envy he feels when he thinks about all the places she could have been, and then the gratitude that follows when he remembers she’s here instead? He’s far from boring, he’s had his share of adventures, he has his own stories to tell too. But he stands in awe of her all the same. 

A long silence passes and she gives him a small smile. She kisses him, eyes open. He opens his eyes too, and runs his hands down her shoulder, slipping the strap of her nightgown off. 

She wakes up craving sex and this is his invitation. He makes love to her in their bed, running his hands along her body. He kisses her breasts and she clasps her fingers in his. It is warm now that the windows are open and even the bedsheet on them feels like too much. A thin film of sweat forms on her chest, and she is slick and pliant beneath him. She moans in his ear and he presses his body closer to hers, though it still doesn’t feel like enough. He wants to whisper that he loves her as she comes but he doesn’t. 

After, she lays her head on his shoulder and breathes quietly. He hears birds outside. It feels all so much like bliss. 

Eventually she lifts her head up. 

“I’m gonna go for a run. Want to come?”

She asks him every day and every day he declines. Probably she knows he will decline and does it to make him feel better, to make him feel like she wouldn’t mind the company. He likes this about her. 

He shakes his head. “You go ahead. I have a few things to do here.” 

She nods her head and rises and walks into the bathroom. He listens for the rattle of pills in her hand—well, not  _ listens for _ , but he is listening and he hears it—and the tap running and a slurp of water from her cupped hands. She reappears and he watches as she removes her nightgown, draping it over a chair in the corner. With his eyes he outlines the soft curvature of her naked body. 

“Stop staring,” she says, and he is pulled from his trance. 

“I’m sorry, I can’t help it.” 

She walks over to him and kisses him on the lips. 

“Don’t work too hard.”

He pulls her by the wrist closer to him, until her forehead is touching his. She grips onto the headboard behind him. 

“Fuck, stay in bed with me today.” 

“I thought you had work to do.”

“Fuck work.” He smooths his hands over her hair and down her back. 

“It’s just a run. I’ll be back in an hour,” she smiles. 

She kisses him again and trails away, unclamping her fingers from his as he watches her leave. 

A few moments later he hears the door shut and then the unmistakable  _ thud thud thud _ of her feet on the gravel. He lies in bed until he can no longer hear it. 

While she runs, he goes for a swim. He enjoys the easy monotony of the laps, being surrounded by water, floating, sinking, floating, sinking. He is not much of a runner but he guesses this is what she gets from that: the sameness of it, the immediacy of it, one stroke to the next, until you’ve gone a full length, and then back again. 

He swims for half an hour and then checks his email and reads the news. He makes himself a coffee and pours a glass of orange juice and finishes the rest of the pastry. 

By then she has returned and she takes a sip of his juice amid gulps of water and tells him she’s going for a shower. 

Then she writes. She writes mostly freehand at first, pouring her ideas and thoughts into lined journals. She tears the pages out of some and leaves them scattered all over the place, here and at home. Then she asks if he’s seen them and he has to ask, “which one?” He steals glances at them sometimes, reads what is legible. Based on the most recent pages he guesses she is right up to the end of 2016, which means she’s right up to the point where they first met. 

When she’s done with the freehand she goes to her computer and starts transcribing. She leaves a stack of sticky notes next to her laptop and writes small notes that she fixes next to the trackpad. Some have been there for weeks, others are replaced in a matter of days. She has massive tomes about the CIA and those are flagged too. He catches her sometimes, reading and rereading them; he doesn’t know how many times she’s gone through them. 

He tries not to ask about any of it. He senses it’s both hard but good for her—he finds her at turns sharper and more focused but also forgetful and scattered. He knows she appreciates having something to do, something to direct her energy toward, something worthwhile. When she first mentioned it to him, an idea phrased as a question, he kept his face even and emotionless. 

“That’s an interesting idea,” he said. Later, in private, he smiled and exhaled. He said a prayer of gratitude that what he’d promised his bosses but dare not promise himself had turned out to be true. That he was right about her. And that was almost a year ago. 

She takes a break around noon and they enjoy lunch together by the pool. He asks what she wants and she says “snack plate,” which is her favorite thing to eat and the term she uses for the assortment of crackers, cheese, crudité, charcuterie, and tinned fish (the latter two she leaves for him) that he arranges neatly on a plate for them to graze on for an hour. He pours himself a glass of Viognier and she drinks iced mint tea with honey. 

She asks if anything interesting is happening in the news or at work and he lies and says no. 

She says she doesn’t want to leave tomorrow, back to normal life, and he smirks and says, “we could just stay here forever.” That makes her laugh and he remembers her in the desert, the blue shirt she was wearing, her hair longer than it is now. Now she smells of suncream, her breath of peppermint. She pulls her hair back behind her neck and her shoulders are tanned and smooth with spots of freckles.

He goes inside to take a shower and after peers at her from the opened window above. She’s removed her sundress to just her bathing suit and she sits with feet outstretched, letting the sun beat down on her. 

They weave in and around each other all day. She comes back inside in mid-afternoon to write some more while he reads. He makes himself a snack and she steals a few bites. He enjoys a beer and she has her usual four-o-clock espresso. They have settled into a comfortable routine here, and he’s glad for it. He adds this to his running list of surprising things about her: her adaptability, how easily she slips into something new. He feels an impending dread when he thinks about returning to Moscow tomorrow, which weirdly gives him comfort. He’s never felt dread about returning to work before, the opposite in fact. How wonderfully strange that emotion is, normal almost, he thinks. 

He makes a vegetable tian for dinner with tomatoes and squash and lots of fresh basil and Carrie acquiesces and enjoys a glass of Sauvignon Blanc with him. They toast to a well-spent holiday and she smiles, fully and unequivocally, as he tells her stories of his boyhood adventures with his brother and then she counters with ones of her own, with her sister, and he feels this overwhelming sense of peace with her, true completeness. He pictures a horseshoe rattling around a post and that’s how he feels: her anchor and her agitator. 

She cleans up after dinner—“you cooked, I’ll clean” is a familiar refrain with them—and joins him outside by one of the lawn chairs where he’s lit a fire. He loves the smell of woody smoke. It transports him to his childhood like little else. She’s taken out a bottle of port and two snifters and she pours them both a glass—hers much smaller than his. 

“Your self-control…” he starts. 

“...is a lot better than it used to be,” she finishes. 

The sun is setting and it’s getting chilly finally so he reaches for the blanket draped over the back of the chair. 

“Come here.” He shifts in the chair to make room for her and she comes to sit next to him. He pulls her legs up over his lap and runs his hands up and down her legs lazily. 

“Did you enjoy yourself these last few weeks?” she asks. 

He takes a sip from the glass. 

“Very much. Why, did you not?” 

“No, I did. I just… I just feel guilty about leaving you alone sometimes to write. Or… do whatever.” 

“I’m a grown man, Carrie, I can occupy myself for a few hours at least.” 

“No, I know,” she says quietly. He senses she’s about to say something else but she just turns away. He sees the reflection of fire in her eyes, alive and burning. 

“Thank you,” she says after a long time. She turns his face to hers and kisses him.

“For what?” 

“For believing in me. In what I’m doing.” 

“I know I’ve said it before, but it’s important. The world deserves to hear what you have to say.” 

He’s not foolish enough to believe she’s doing it all for unselfish reasons. And he’s not hypocritical enough to believe none of those reasons benefit him. But he feels at the center of it is real truth and that  _ is _ important. And if he has to drag her across the finish line, so be it. 

“And anyway, will you ever let me read what you’ve written?” 

She wrinkles her nose. 

“It’s not ready. I mean, yes, obviously, I want you to be the first to read it, but…” 

“But what?” 

She curls her mouth like she’s not sure, and maybe she isn’t. 

She laughs to herself. “I know it feels silly to be self-conscious about something that will be published for the whole world to read, but I do.” 

“Self-conscious about what?” 

She sighs. 

“It was… my life. It  _ is _ my life... I don’t know, maybe I’m just saying words.” 

She takes another sip of port. Her glass is almost empty. He doesn’t press her. Maybe she was just saying words. 

They sit like that for a long time, staring into the cobalt sky, their faces illuminated by fire, the sounds of creatures that surface only at night and the crackle of sparks flying in the air interrupting their blanket of silence. 

They finish the bottle of port and it’s more than she’s had to drink maybe since he’s known her and she is smiley and slow and all over him and they are upstairs now and when she comes out of the bathroom she’s wearing the lingerie he bought her, a black lace negligee and nothing else and he sits straight up. She switches the lights off and walks over to his side of the bed. 

He is hungry for her, he wants her, his belly filled with a hot desire that feels briefly overwhelming. 

She lets him fuck her. She gets something from this too, he realizes later. Pure pleasure, perhaps. A way to shut off her own brain, to give into something or someone, to be submissive. Or the opposite: to dominate, to have total control. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t ask but he considers the ethics of two selfish desires: do they cancel each other out, and so then become selfless? Did it have to be a zero-sum game? Maybe they could both get what they wanted from each other. The idea strikes him as simultaneously obvious and radical. 

He groans when she twists her hips and he nearly rips the lace when he snakes a hand up her back to her neck. She lets out a high-pitched gasp, an inhale or exhale of pleasure, he can’t be sure. She goes lax then and she smiles and tosses her head back and he thinks he’ll be hearing that sound in his dreams tonight. 

When they’re lying in bed together later he asks abruptly, “Are you happy?” 

She doesn’t hesitate. “Yes. Why? Are you?” 

“I am. But sometimes I think, it’s not in our nature.” 

“To be happy?”

He nods. He’s still running his fingers through her hair, an idle habit. 

“I used to feel the same way.” 

He is quiet again. Then: “It’s like we’re, how do you say… waiting for the other shoe to drop?” 

He doesn’t know if he imagines it but he feels her cling to him tighter. Her breathing becomes quieter. 

“I guess some things are hard to unlearn,” he says, a thought he’s unconsciously voiced aloud. 

He’s not sure if she heard him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to @ascloseasthis for continuing to beta read and pointing out that Carrie Mathison is a vegetarian! 
> 
> For eagle-eyed viewers, the Matryoshka doll is actually featured in the series finale on the corner of Carrie's desk.


	6. Time of Troubles (one year, five months)

She runs like she’s being chased. 

She looks down. You are supposed to look straight when you’re running, ten paces in front, but she looks down. At her feet, at her knee caps, how they look bony and she wishes her thighs were smaller. 

She feels the way her legs connect to the rest of her body, their lightness as she moves through the street, gliding over pavement. She weaves in and out of traffic and passersby. She doesn’t stop at crosswalks, she keeps running the same direction until she can cross and then doubles back the way she came. It’s an intricate dance and if someone were actually tracking her they’d have a hard time discerning pattern or motive. 

_I wasn’t followed._

Bluemont Park. Brandenburg Gate. Red Square. _Saul, you’re in a courtyard. You need to exit it now_. 

It is late September, finally cool, small breeze. She wears a pair of black shorts and a white v-neck men’s undershirt she found in his closet. He says it’s too large on her, which is true, but she can’t stand feeling restricted, preferring to float in the fabric and his scent. She is hot in her belly and cold to the touch. She passes behind a car idling in the street and inhales the exhaust, sweet and dirty. 

She passes a body. No, a person. A person’s body, in a grassy square adjacent to the sidewalk. She does a double take. Is he sleeping? He—she thinks it’s a he— is sprawled out, arms overhead, legs twisted like a helix. She looks around for someone else, but there is no one else. She can’t say _do you think that man is dead or just asleep?_ in Russian. She keeps going and makes a mental note to check for him on the way back. She forgets after three minutes. 

She enters the park where she runs every other day and it’s the same as it looks every other day and she turns right to start the loop as she does every other day. 

Her body knows this now, it knows this rhythm. It knows the hard parts, uphill, the curves, the uneven pavement. It knows how long is four minutes, nine minutes, one mile, two. She feels in sync with her body. It is one silver lining. 

_But this is different, Carrie. You’re not on your own anymore_. 

_I had a kind of epiphany today._

_You know it’s way too late for any of that._

She hears the leaves rustle in the wind and the sound is indiscernible from a young woman biking down the path, the rush as she speeds by in the other direction. 

In the distance she spots red checkered tape in the middle of the vast expanse of grass. She looks up finally. The tape has squared off a tree, maybe six stories tall. Its branches have all been cut off, a gnarled twist of grey bark. No shade now, only shadow. 

_What they did to you._

_It’s over. It’s over now, baby._

She slows to a walk and circles back the other direction. She turns back to the tree, which seems smaller now, so much further away. 

Hands on her hips, panting. She places her palm on her chest, under the _V_ of his shirt, and feels her heartbeat’s steady drum. 

She thinks he might know. That the book is a cover, truth wrapped in a lie. Not for him. Or, maybe, _entirely_ for him. Last night, when they were in bed together, she thought, _he’s trying to fuck the truth out of me_ . He stared at her with hungry eyes, insatiable. _Tell me, tell me_ , he seemed to say. She could be imagining it. She smeared her thumb across his lips.

He turned his face away and she withdrew her hand. She couldn’t look at him then. She tried to drain all movement from herself. She went the opposite of limp, she was stone, like biting your lip to keep from screaming.

“Look at me,” he said, drawing a _V_ on her neck with his thumb and forefinger. He pulled her to him by the chin. 

She had to look _. I am_. “I am.”

Now she is running again. She passes two more bodies. No, children. Lying on the grass, like corpses, facing the sky, head to toe and head to toe. 

_You’re safe, you’re not there, everything’s fine._

It occurs to her she is without her phone and keys and any sort of identification and that someone could come up from behind her, palm over her mouth, and snap her neck. Then do whatever they wanted with her body. She feels a twist of fear in her stomach at the thought, a momentary surge of panic. 

What would the headlines say then? Would there be any? Who would be blamed? Would she be a martyr? Or would they say she got what was coming for her?

She closes her eyes for a moment, downhill _, just for a few more seconds_ , and lets herself feel what that feels like. Like fear and freedom fused. 

_Hang you on a doorknob and call it suicide._

_I’m not a traitor._

A woman runs past her and she smells exactly like her best friend from high school, the way her house used to smell. She is instantly in her bedroom, doing homework, reading magazines, talking about boys, talking about girls, talking about all the places they’d go together when they were finally old enough. 

She feels herself slowing down and wills herself to take longer strides. “You’re born with the legs you have,” her dad used to say. Whatever that meant. She misses him so much her body aches. 

_All this woulda broke his heart._

Faster. 

“Some days you’re feeling it. Some days you’re not feeling it.” 

Faster. 

Her editor wrote that to her in an email when she explained she was having writer’s block. 

“Well today I’m not feeling it,” she wrote back. 

“Try again tomorrow.” 

Not feeling it. Not feeling it not feeling it not feeling it not feeling it. For twenty-two days. 

She wants to scream. 

Faster. 

A sound escapes her throat that’s halfway between anguish and ecstasy. 

She wants to lock herself inside and not come out until it’s summer again and the days go on forever. 

She retreated into her office—on the not feeling it days—and pretended to work. She went over the books she bought and had worn to pulp. She wrote about things that were not important, like what she was wearing and the plots of TV shows she hadn’t watched since she was small and all the airports she’d ever been in and the birthdays of everyone she’d known and every word she’d learned in Russian. She wrote just to write, advice from her editor, and she had to say: it was shit advice. She stopped after three days. Then she laid on the floor, the only position that felt halfway decent. She closed her eyes and let her mind fall blank and eventually she did accidentally fall asleep, only woken by his incessant knocking.

“Carrie? You in there?” 

“I’m fine.” 

He opened the door. 

“It’s almost nine, have you eaten?”

“I’m not hungry.” 

“Have you eaten all day?”

“I told you I’m not hungry.” 

She opened her eyes and he was standing right above her, facing the other direction. 

“Did you write any pages today?” 

_Do not pull this shit with me right now._

“No.”

“Come on, I’ll make you some dinner.” 

“What part of ‘I’m not hungry’ was unclear?” 

He made a face. 

“What?” 

There was something about lying on the ground beneath him that made her feel acutely vulnerable, bordering on unsafe, so she pulled herself up and sat in the chair in the corner, like a child in timeout. 

He turned to face her. 

“I was just trying to do something nice.” 

“Well don’t. I’m not a fucking prisoner in one of your cells, I can feed myself when I’m hungry.” 

“Fine,” he said, throwing his hands up in surrender. He walked out. 

She knew it was dangerous, to play with him like this, to fuck with his head, push him away and then pull him toward her. She lied and said she was testing herself by testing him. How far could she go, where was the line really? She felt her grip on everything slipping with each passing day that she didn’t finish. She felt herself getting nastier, _harder_ , sharp edges everywhere. She was really starting to hate herself. 

_You don’t know the first thing, about any of it._

_Because you won’t let me._

_And really let you in._

_We are not talking about the same thing._

_What are you talking about?_

The jig is up. 

The other shoe drops. 

The house of cards comes crashing down. 

She apologized to him later and they made love and it felt like they’d patched over something ugly and terrible and maybe they had, maybe _she_ had. 

Maybe the twenty-second day was really the first day and it was all almost over and then she could be free. 

She is almost sprinting now. She pulls herself back, to now, to her feet one in front of the other, and looks down again. A half-eaten apple discarded in the grass. A plastic bag tied around a wooden post.

She passes a statue commemorating the end of the Time of Troubles, and her eyes roam over the inscription at the bottom: 1612 AD. She mouths the words slowly, _anno Domini_. 

_What do I look like from the outside_ , she wonders. _Like someone unwell._

_Anno equals year. Domini equals God._

_I thought the A stood for after._

_No, Anno._

_After, like after Jesus._

_After Jesus did what?_

_After Jesus was born._

_No after Jesus died. The D stands for death._

_So one AD is one year after Jesus died?_

_Yeah._

_He died so we could live._

_What does that have to do with anything?_

_It doesn’t stand for after death. It means, in the year of our Lord._

_How come there were churches and stuff built in BC years then?_

_There was religion before Jesus. People worshiped other gods._

_But there is no year zero. There is just before God, and after._

_Back then it was just… the present._

How strange, she’d thought as a child, for time to be demarcated like that. 

No one ever thinks they’re at the beginning of something.


	7. Prologue (one year, ten months)

One of the first things I learned at the CIA was how not to break. As a case officer, I would be a guardian of human intelligence, and I learned that the knowledge I would eventually gain was valuable and sought-after. I learned that the human aspect of that intelligence was volatile but precious and to be protected at all costs. 

I learned methods of evasion and resistance. I learned how to be invisible. Eventually I learned details of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that the American government would, years later, falsely claim were no longer used at home or abroad. I learned these details so that I might understand how to withstand them. 

The second thing I learned is that everybody breaks. If you pile onto a person sleep deprivation, humiliation, starvation, isolation, and the threat of mortal danger to your family and loved ones, you will break. There’s no way around it. The enemy won’t let you die, and it becomes the only alternative. Everyone has a survival instinct and so everyone breaks. 

At the time, it was comforting. The possibility of being captured by an enemy combatant seemed extremely remote to my 22-year-old self, so I absorbed this training eagerly in all its hypothetical wildness. What would I do? How would I react? I foolishly believed, like I’m sure every other recruit who’s come through The Farm, that I would be the exception. 

I wasn’t. I did break. 

This book, however, is not about that. 

As I sat in a jail cell in Moscow in 2017, slowly losing my mental faculties after weeks of isolation and without vital medication, I thought about that training and why I felt so comforted at the time at that cellular truth. It certainly wasn’t providing me comfort at that moment. 

I realized it was because it took all blame and agency from me. It couldn’t be my fault that I broke under extreme pressure, because everyone did it. It was not my choice. It happened  _ to  _ me. 

These are lies we tell ourselves. In the moment they are necessary. We need them to survive. But they are lies all the same. 

A few weeks prior to my jail cell epiphany, I said goodbye to my daughter in my sister’s kitchen back in America. I was headed to Moscow later that night for a covert operation to retrieve Simone Martin, who was believed to be involved in a Russian plot to overthrow former President Elizabeth Keane, and return her to America to testify before Congress. 

I told my daughter I had to go to work far away and she asked if I was coming back. “Of course I’m coming back,” I told her. “I always come back.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the last time I’d ever see her. 

As I hugged my sister goodbye, she told me, “Now go. Go do what you were born to do.” 

Like that second truth, this affirmation felt strangely comforting when she whispered it in my ear. I thought about her words often as I sat in that Russian jail cell. Was this what I was born to do? Was this my fate, my destiny? Were all the other times I had tried to stifle that fate, had tried to chart a new or different path in my life, ultimately unsuccessful because God or some other power had a different plan for me? 

After my training at The Farm, I started in the counterterrorism division at Langley, working for Saul Berenson, former National Security Advisor and Director of the CIA and also the man who recruited me out of college and served as my mentor, ally, and friend for nearly twenty years. Early on, I learned that he had been imprisoned in Malaysia for three months in the early 1980s. I stared at him wide-eyed, in complete awe. I asked if he broke. 

“Of course I broke. Everyone does.” I felt comfort again that someone so revered as him could affirm what I’d learned in my training. 

I was ready to move on to my next question about what to me seemed like great adventures when he continued in a hushed whisper: “They want you to think that the opposite of no loyalty is loyalty. They’re lying.” 

“Who’s  _ they _ ?” I asked. 

He raised his eyebrows and held his palms up, gesturing all around us. I leaned in, enraptured. I felt the sanctity of what he was sharing, the holiness of his wisdom. 

He went on to explain that on the spectrum of loyalty there are two ends: on one, those without it, who will point whichever way the wind blows, who will serve whichever master offers them the quickest or greatest reward. On the other are the blindly loyal, mindless drones who will point wherever directed, and who serve only one master, unconditionally. Neither can be trusted. 

In my decades-long career at the CIA, I met many people on both sides of that line. Then, improbably, I found that I had become one of them. 

The subtitle of this book is “Why I Betrayed My Country,” which, in all honesty, was not one I chose. My publishers suggested it. I bristle at the word:  _ betrayal _ . It twists something inside of me. I fought for months for it to be removed. I ultimately lost.

It is well-publicized that in 2018 I gave up the name of a highly sensitive, longtime American intelligence source inside the Kremlin. This asset later took their own life. To the American intelligence community, I committed the cardinal sin of the work, which is to protect the human sources of intelligence at all costs. As a result I now have a black mark on my back that can never be erased. 

What is less well-publicized is why I did this and for whom. With this book I attempt to offer a defense of this decision, for it  _ was _ ultimately my choice. And if that choice amounted to betrayal, maybe we need a new definition for the word. 

This book has offered me a final, gleaming truth, which is that my life was far from predetermined and what I thought was my fate was not so. My hope is that by the end of my story you don’t agree with my decision so much as understand it. And that you understand the foregone conclusions offered to you by American lawmakers and policy makers about the way life ought to be, about what can and must be done, are, ultimately, lies. You can cover your eyes and ears and swallow what they serve you, or you can reject it, and demand something better. 

What choice will you make?


	8. Storytelling (one year, ten months, five minutes)

He flips the last page over onto the others and gathers them in a stack in his hands, fixing a paper clip to the top left corner. 

He taps his knuckles softly on the door of her office. He tries not to do that as much anymore. He doesn’t like to interrupt her, and she doesn’t like to be interrupted. 

He tells himself this is different. She’d printed the pages for him, left them on the kitchen table with a red felt pen and an instruction to “be totally honest.” 

“Carrie?” 

He opens the door tentatively. 

She’s pacing the length of the room, a pair of reading glasses slipping off the bridge of her nose. She runs a hand through her hair. She’s holding a stack of pages in her hand too, absentmindedly clicking the end of a pen, _open shut open shut open shut_. She looks up when she turns back in his direction. 

“So?” 

“It’s very good,” he answers. 

“Not too…” she searches. “Self-righteous?” 

He huffs out a smile. 

“No, just self-righteous enough.” 

She starts shaking her head and raises her eyebrows and he realizes she’s not satisfied. 

“Nothing else? No… constructive feedback?” She smiles and sets down the pages. “Or non-constructive, I’m not picky.” 

“I don’t know, I am not a writer or editor.” 

“Sure, but you don’t need to be an editor to have an opinion.” 

He can’t tell if he’s walking on eggshells or if he’s overwhelmed with relief or if he really is just devoid of an opinion. Maybe all of the above. She’d been less volatile, more agreeable, for a few weeks now. There was a stretch that felt endless when he felt she could hardly stand to look at him and he was terrified it was because, perhaps, in the writing of it, she’d started to remember what had actually happened to her—what _he_ had done. Or, not remembered, because he doesn’t think she’d ever actually forgotten, but _absorbed_. Until the memory and the experience and that self became a part of her, inextricable from the self that loved him. Perhaps, in the writing of it, she’d realized those two selves were ultimately incompatible.

He’d left her alone for most of it. He found he was able to ride the waves of her moods more easily than he would have thought. She was witheringly cruel in her honesty, fragile like crystal. 

“Was it true?” he says finally. 

He’s still standing in the doorway. He doesn’t like coming into her office, this space which feels so sacred, plastered all over with remnants of her book and her career and the shattered legacy she’d left behind. 

She approaches him. 

“What?” 

“About Franny?” 

She removes the glasses from her face and looks up at him properly. 

“Yes,” she says softly. 

“You never told me that,” he says matter-of-factly, then smiles to let her know he’s not upset. 

Her eyes shift away, then back to him. 

“I always wonder,” he starts, “how do people who write about their own lives remember exactly the words people said to them years ago?” 

She smiles.

“I mean, _they_ know that _we_ know there is no way those can be direct quotes, but they use quotations.” 

“It’s called _storytelling_ ,” she says mockingly. 

She leans back against the doorframe, her hands behind her waist, and they are mirrored now, the top of an _X_. 

He nods to himself and she tilts her head and exhales. 

“And Saul,” he says abruptly, almost unconsciously, or perhaps totally aware. 

He doesn’t know why he said it. They have talked about him exactly once in almost two years, a few weeks ago, when he’d looked over her shoulder at a _Washington Post_ article she was reading. The headline mentioned the former National Security Advisor was in critical condition after a major heart attack. And she asked if he’d heard anything and he replied no, I’m sorry, I know how important he is to you. And she walked up to him, wrapped her arms around his waist and tilted her head up and said was, _was_ important to me. 

He wasn’t sure if he believed it. In his head he just heard her in Gush Etzion, telling him he didn’t understand anything. And maybe he didn’t. Maybe whatever had existed between them was beyond his comprehension. 

He doesn’t lie to himself about what this is and how they got here. He wants to shut off the part of his brain that says it could all be performance—for his sake as well as hers. His mind just runs in loops, extrapolating all possibilities and then he feels her cheek against his chest and wills himself to be like her, to trust his gut, his gut which is telling him to kiss her and that’s what he does, that’s what he did. He kissed her, and she kissed him, and it almost felt like an acknowledgement of what they couldn't say aloud but both knew to be true: that Saul had loved her, which is what led him to her in the first place. And that she had a tendency of accepting the absolute worst from people, which is what led her to him. 

“What about him?” she says, still leaning against the doorframe. 

“You miss him,” he says. “I can tell from the way you write about him.” 

She straightens herself.

“How’s that?” 

He frowns. 

“I can just tell.” 

She clenches her jaw and he waits for her to say something in response but she is hard steel. 

“I’m really tired,” he says then. “I’m going upstairs.” He hands her the collection of papers. He ascends the staircase painstakingly slowly, hoping she might call after him, but she doesn’t. Out of the corner of his eye he sees her still standing in the doorway, one half of her face illuminated by the lamplight of her office, eyes darted up at him. And a moment later the door shuts quietly behind her. 

He wakes the next morning early, too early, and reaches his arm across the bed hoping to find her body there but the space she’s left is cold. Overnight the temperature has dropped sharply and he rummages through his closet to find a sweater before heading downstairs. 

He almost doesn’t spot her, and her shadowy silhouette at the counter startles him. 

“Coffee’s hot,” she says as he walks by. 

He grabs a mug from the cabinet and pours from the French press on the stove. 

“I didn’t hear you come to bed last night. You weren’t up all night, were you?” 

She opens her mouth to respond and he catches himself. 

“Sorry.”

“For what?”

“I don’t mean to monitor you.”

“That’s okay. I wasn’t.” 

“You weren’t what?”

“Up all night. By the time I was finished you were asleep and I didn’t want to wake you.” 

“How is everything going?” he says, gesturing to her office, and he silently scolds himself for doing it again. 

“Good,” she says simply. “Final edits are definitely almost done.”

He takes a sip of coffee and sits at the table. He slides his iPad over and starts scrolling through the headlines from overnight. 

The silence between them is long and heavy. 

“Can I tell you something?” she says after a few minutes. 

“Sure,” he says without looking up. He is acutely aware of how chilly he’s being, especially now, in the clear light of morning, but to give anything more feels Herculean. 

She walks up behind him and pulls a chair over to his. She takes the iPad from his hands and turns him toward her so that he must look. She slides her palms over her knees and looks into his eyes and in that moment the chilliness falls away, it is warm again, like crossing from the shade into sunlight on a winter day. It’s still cold, but at least the sun is out. It is what she does. It is what she is so good at. He doesn’t even remember when it was never like that. 

“I do miss him,” she says finally. “Saul.” 

“I already knew that.” 

“Please let me finish,” she says in her most even voice, but it still stings him. He tightens his body so as not to betray anything and she takes a deep breath. 

“I miss… the safety… he offered me.” 

He untightens. “You are safe here, Carrie,” he whispers. 

“I know,” she says softly back. 

“But…” she looks up to the ceiling, at nothing in particular. She starts to shake her head. If this is a prepared speech, she is doing a poor job of delivering it. 

“It’s more than just _physical_ safety. There was a… an _emotional_ safety. In knowing that he would always be there for me. That there was nothing I could do…” she trails off. 

He doesn’t know what to say. They’ve had this conversation before, many times. He tells her that lines exist to be crossed. Maybe she was only now starting to listen. 

“But it wasn’t unconditional.” 

She swallows. “I know. That’s my point.” 

She seems so delicate sitting here before him, her hair a bit tangled from sleep, her oversized cardigan hanging off her body. _You haven’t broken anything_ , he thinks. _You haven’t broken anything that wasn’t broken to begin with._

“And… I don’t know, I felt safe believing I was on the _right side_.” Her eyes light up and he realizes she’s mocking herself. “One of the good guys.” 

But her smile fades and he sees tears start to form at the corner of her eyes, and she looks away from him. 

“Hey… look at me.” 

She does. 

“I swore an _oath,_ Yevgeny. To my country.” She barely gets the last word out. Her voice is shaking. 

“Fuck _country_. You stopped a _war_.” 

She looks down and shakes her head. 

He tilts his head in the direction of her office. “Do you even believe what you wrote on those pages? You did that, Carrie. I was there.”

He lifts a hand to her face and wipes a tear from her cheek and she moves her face toward his, just a fraction of an inch. It’s been so long since he’s seen her like this. Her moods, her aggression, her rage are one thing. But her uncertainty now has transformed her into something altogether different, and he remembers walking beside her beneath the birch trees and the way she’d tell a story, like she was unsure of the ending, or whether it had really happened. The psychosis had eroded something—he knew that even then—and she spoke softly and carefully, like she was uncovering the truth in real time, with him. 

He thinks he loved her even then, when she was most unlike herself—or, perhaps, that was—this is now—the most true version of her.

“Do you remember what you said to me in Israel?”

Her eyes meet his again. 

“You said, I don’t know what your side is like but it must be lonely. Do you remember?”

“Of course,” she whispers. 

“I think you were lying. I think you knew it then and you know it now.”

She furrows her brow. 

“The sides are much more similar than you say.” 

Her face is wet with tears but she’s not crying anymore. 

“And you know what else I think?” 

He lowers his head ever so slightly and moves closer. 

“I think you were more alone there than you are here.” 

She inhales and her breath shakes in her throat. 

“Do you—” she starts, but stops herself.

“I—”

Whatever words she’s trying to say seem to tremble in her. He is only patient. 

“You know that I love you, right?” she finally says. 

“Yes. I know.” 

“I know that you love me too.” 

“Yes.” 

“I guess I… I guess I didn’t think it would be this hard.” 

“I know. I know it’s hard.” 

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know. He realizes for the first time just how much. They came together from a sense of shared history and purpose and desire. But now, even as she kisses him, her fingers in his hair, her body warm and pressed to his, he can’t help feeling like he’s searching around in the dark while she dances in circles around him, her eyes having already adjusted.


	9. Москва (two years)

_Hello, Professor Rabin_

_Greetings, Professor Rabino_

_Greetings, Mr. Berenson._

_Remember when I used to call you that? Mr. Berenson._

_Hi from Mother Russia._

_Greetings from Moscow, Mr._

_Greetings from Moscow, Professor._

_The Russian missile defense system_

_The Russian S-400 missile defense system sold to Iran and Turkey has a backdoor. It can be defeated. Specs to come. Send my lov_

_Specs to follow. Hope you ar_

_Specs to follow. Talk so_

_Specs to follow. Stay tuned._

She looks at the scrap of paper now, painstakingly cut into a neat rectangle, and she can feel her heart beat faster in her chest. She glances back at the still-closed office door and rummages in her desk drawer for a pair of tweezers. Carefully she lifts the book—her book—up and inserts the piece of paper into the spine. 

She closes the book and straightens the jacket, running her fingers over her own black-and-white portrait. Later she will place it in an unmarked envelope at a dead drop location two miles from here. 

She gets to work on the bag, drawing a straight line on the inside lining with an x-acto knife. She folds another scrap of paper with the Georgetown address in half, then in half again. She cuts a piece of tape and fixes it to the fabric. She glances back at the closed door again. It is uncomfortably quiet and she tries to steady herself with the smooth, even strokes of the needle and thread, in and out, up and down. She pricks herself and brings her finger to her mouth.

It is close to midday and he’ll be back soon. She brings the sewing kit back upstairs to the closet and notices he’s already picked out his clothes for tonight. She smiles. 

She carries the book downstairs and sets it on the kitchen table next to a small box of a few other copies and his note:

_Into office for a few hours. Back soon. X -Y_

He goes into the office on Saturday mornings a lot now. She always protests, just enough to make him feel needed but not enough to be annoying. Men want to be needed, even him.

She looks around the apartment, their massive, sprawling space, opens the door, and heads out. 

_A sliver of green._

She walks back through the door two hours later, a mix of elation and lightness that she’s only ever been able to replicate while medicated through drugs or sex. Her head is swimming with details—the line written in yellow chalk, her GRU tail sitting on a park bench casually reading a newspaper, as if anyone reads newspapers anymore—and she feels close to intoxicated and doesn’t want it to stop. 

He is sitting at the table flipping through pages of her book. 

“Hi,” she says. 

“Hi.” 

He closes the book. 

“Doing some light reading?” 

She removes her coat and drapes it over the back of the sofa. 

“Isn’t there an abridged version of this?” 

“ _Ha ha_ ,” she says, exaggerating both syllables. 

She walks up behind him and smooths her hands down the front of his shirt and pulls his face around toward hers. 

“I missed you,” she whispers into his mouth. 

“It was only a few hours.”

“Felt longer.” 

She kisses him, open-mouthed, trailing her fingers through his hair in a way she knows he likes. 

“How was class?” he asks, pulling her into his lap. 

“Very good, Colonel,” she answers in Russian. That makes him laugh. 

One of the downsides of writing about the yoga play is she can’t actually use it anymore, but Russian language classes are just as convenient of an excuse, and effective in many more ways. 

“They teach you all the military ranks today?” 

“Nyet.” 

She shifts in his lap and thinks she can feel him hard underneath her. She wonders if that gets him off, to be addressed that way, by her. 

“I learned that on my own,” she says, kissing him. She brushes his hair from his forehead. “You smell good.” 

“Just had a shower.” 

“That’s a shame. I was just about to head upstairs for one myself.” 

She kisses him again, eyes open, catches his lip in her teeth and rises from his lap. Slowly she climbs the staircase, working the buttons on her shirt all the while and she can feel his gaze fixed on her as she drops the shirt to the floor at the top of the stairs and removes the rest of her clothes. 

She hears the door to the shower open a few minutes later and her body instinctively tenses. He eases up tentatively behind her and breathes into her ear and he glides a hand up her thigh and rests it between her legs in a way that makes her gasp. 

She melts with the desire to be touched by him. To give him power and control over her body, to mold herself into the spaces he makes. To be handled. 

“Fuck,” she mutters. 

Sometimes he is gentle but she doesn’t want that. He turns her around and he must sense it too. Water drips from his eyebrows and she can see in his eyes his lust for her, for her body. He backs her against the wall and she raises her arms over her head. He slides his hands down her arms, down the perfect curved arc of her body, his breath verging on panting. 

“I want you,” she says. 

_This is how everything works._

They go to bed. The hours crawl by, and she stares up at the ceiling. She feels calmer now, her mind has quieted, he has forced it, she has forced him to force her. So much of their life together feels this way. Is he letting her? Is she letting him let her? Motive and intent, they fade away, and the line between one side and the other blurs.

 _It is better than nothing_ , she thinks, and then corrects herself: _no, it is not nothing, it is everything_. Pull him in and step away, it is a dance and he is her partner. He knows all the steps and he lets her lead anyway. 

She turns her cheek and watches him sleep, smooth and steady, breathe in, breathe out. He sleeps with one arm tucked under his pillow and he doesn’t snore, a small miracle. 

_This is how everything works._

His eyes open and his lips curl up into a smile. 

“Watching me sleep?” he says groggily. 

“Thinking,” she says slowly. 

_About?_

He shuts his eyes and sighs. 

“What time is it?” 

“Almost five.” 

“Need to get ready soon.” 

She turns back to the ceiling and he folds his pillow in half so he can look at her. 

“The publishers called me earlier. They want to set me up with a journalist. For a profile or something.”

“An American journalist?” 

“British, I think. She writes in _The Guardian_.” 

“Have you already done your research?” he laughs. 

“No,” she replies playfully. “Not yet anyway.” 

“Will you do it?” 

“Do you think I should?” 

She’s already made up her mind but she asks him anyway. She wants to know what he thinks, she wants to know what he is thinking. Some men are easy, they want so little and it is obvious. To feel smart, to feel desired, to feel powerful. Admittedly, sometimes he is like this. For instance, three hours ago.

Sometimes, though, he is unknowable. She looks at him and she feels powerless, out of control, lost in the world he built her. Not for long, but these moments take her breath away. Suddenly she is back in that cell, in that padded room, just waiting for him to open the door. 

_I can’t see into your fucking soul_. 

“I don’t see how it could hurt. It will promote the book, which is a good thing,” he says. 

“What if she asks about you? Or us?” 

“You’ll find a version of the truth.” 

He brings his fingers to her hip and starts tracing small, slow circles. She finally looks over at him. 

“You’re right,” she says. “I’m gonna do it.” 

“Good,” he says. 

He runs his hand across her stomach. 

“I like this on you,” he says, taking in the dusty pink silkiness of her negligee. 

She raises her eyebrows. 

“I might like it better off you…” he continues, smirking. 

_Yes you can. Yes you can._

Every desire he has she can fill. Every wish, she is sure she could realize. She is not an object to him, far from it. She is finally real, filled up. He made her so. They made each other. 

_You wait, you lay low, and then…_

His hands are all over, her hands are on him. 

_Then you come to life._

They take their time. 

She is conscious that she is always making him wait, so she starts getting ready a full hour before him, and still he pokes his head in and tells her the car is here. 

He smiles and tells her to close her eyes, and she rolls them instead before obliging and she hears his footsteps behind her, she can _feel_ him, though he hasn’t touched her yet. 

She feels something cold around her neck, then heavy, then his hands in her hair and she wants that moment to extend outward for as long as it takes. He is gentle, sliding his palms over her robe, and she opens her eyes and it’s a diamond necklace. She loses her breath for a second. He kneels beside her and she tries to find words. 

He says it is for finishing and she thinks about how so much has ended now. But she’s not through the hard part. The hard part will still keep coming, it will never stop, because he thinks it’s all really over. 

She thanks him and he grows serious, her hand in his, and says she’s done something very important. 

_The plan is a success._

_Not if he dies._

_More so if he dies._

He laughs and she loves him. He loves her. She is loved. This is what love feels like then. 

He goes back downstairs because the car is waiting and she follows him, figure in black, and she feels a wave of fondness for him. It sinks like a stone inside of her and guilt and pride and patience and lust and all the sins and all the virtues ripple outward in waves. 

She tells him she just needs her purse and she skips into her office and glances at the photo of Franny, and Saul’s address is in her hands now. It is all in her hands now. The light is dim and yellow and she pauses at the patchwork quilt she’s built, an array of ghosts and hooded figures, death and traitors. She doesn’t want to look now, not tonight. 

_I have to say goodbye now._

_Stay down._

_I always come back._

_Carrie._

_He thinks he’s going to fuckin’ heaven._

_Yevgeny’s here._

_Go do what you were born to do._

The voices swirl and twist in the air, in her, and then she shuts the lights off and closes the door and they vanish in an instant, locked away. 

He takes her to his favorite bar. His actual favorite, she knows now. Double vodka for him, dirty martini for her. They toast to her, and she feels his warmth, it’s sunny here, forget the cold. 

The music starts and it’s like hearing it brand new. He takes her hand in his and she feels his thumb tap idly against hers. The light is blue and cloudy, and he places his arm around her, across the back of her chair, and she has the distinct feeling that she belongs to him. It doesn’t scare her, or offend her, or stir every feeling of fear or longing that’s crept into her bed on sleepless nights. Instead it just feels right. To belong to him, and to be needed, the way he needs her. 

She tells him she’ll be right back and he unlinks himself from her and she finds the other woman just as planned, just as directed. Inside she is spinning, outside she is marble, and this is it, this is _everything_. She is twenty-five again, when she first invented this trick, or told herself she had. She wonders if Saul will place a small _Москва_ sticker on the inside of her book, like all of Anna’s. She imagines him sitting, legs crossed, in one of those heavy club chairs, drinking scotch and listening to Mozart, staring at her book, the strip of black among a sea of red, and wondering, _wondering_. She returns to her seat and she smiles, the secret filling her from the inside out. 

He whispers in her ear, “You’re glowing.” 

“It’s the music,” she replies.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to @ascloseasthis for beta reading and indulging my periodic word count updates!
> 
> This story is my attempt to fill the two-year gap in the finale. Thank you for reading!


End file.
